Not applicable
1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of telephony, and more particularly relates to the field of automated bulk calling over telephones for collection agencies, tele-marketing, telephone surveys and other similar applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of automated bulk calling via telephony has been around for awhile. Telephone solicitors, telephone surveys and others have been making use of computer databases containing phone numbers to target sales, surveys and other requirements. The computer databases typically contain telephone numbers, names, addresses and other information found in a telephone book. These database can be optimized to certain market demographics, for example, to people in a region that normally receives snow and optimized for regions based on social economic data, such as, people who donate money to charitable organizations.
FIG. 1 illustrates a functional block diagram of a typical telephone network for bulk calling using analog phone lines to a Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN). Several customer telephones 102, are coupled to the PSTN 104. A plurality of operator stations 110 with a database 108 connected to a network 106 is shown. The next telephone number to be dialed from the database 108 is displayed on the appropriate operator station 110. At each operator station 110, an operator telephone 112 is connected to the PSTN 104. The connection between the operator telephone 112 to the PSTN 104 is over analog lines 114. An operator sitting at a station 110 uses the operator telephone 112 connected to the PSTN 104, to dial the next number in the database. In some embodiments, the number in the database is automatically dialed from the database 108 for the operator sitting at the operator station 110. While this architecture for providing bulk calling services is useful, it is not without its shortcomings.
One shortcoming in the typical telephone network for bulk calling is that the telephone 112 at each operator station 110 must be directly coupled to the PSTN 104. This requirement that each telephone 112 at the operator station 110 can be expensive because a separate analog line must be coupled to the PSTN 104. Accordingly, a need exists to provide a bulk calling system that eliminates the requirement that the telephone at each operator station be directly connected to a PSTN.
Another shortcoming in the typical telephone network for bulk calling is the ability to handle telephone customers whose lines are busy or not available. Typically, the operator sitting at the operator station 110 must manually update the database 108 when a call to the customer telephones 102 does not complete. This method of marking the database 108 that the call was not complete can be cumbersome and is prone to operator errors. Moreover, many times, the operator does not know immediately if the called telephone subscriber at a particular location has subscribed to additional services or supplementary services, such as xe2x80x9cFind Mexe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cCall Forwardingxe2x80x9d service and must wait for a delay or signal over the PSTN 104 to indicate such a service is invoked. Many bulk solicitors do not want to speak with a party with additional services running and would rather speak with the potential telephone customer at their home numbers. The ability to determine if additional services are running for a telephone subscriber is not always possible over direct analog connections to the PSTN 104 without other intelligent devices for sensing that the called party is running a subscriber service. One method to handle the cases where a telephone subscriber may not be available is to have each operator station 110 include additional hardware and software such as an application using the Microsoft TAPI (Telephony API) and corresponding hardware to dial a number from the database 108. The hardware could log the status backed to the database 108 if a successful call has completed. This method although effective, can be expensive because each operator station 110 not only needs to have an analog connection 114 to the PSTN 104 but must have the speciality hardware and software inside each operator unit as well. Therefore, a need exists for a bulk calling architecture to overcome these limitations.
Briefly, in accordance with the present invention, a system for providing bulk calling over a public switched telephone network (PSTN) comprising: an Internet Protocol (IP) telephony gateway for receiving at least one PSTN line; a database connected to the gateway for providing telephone customer information; one or more client information processing units, each unit capable of being linked to at least one IP telephone; and a local area network connecting each of the client information processing units with the gateway. In accordance with another embodiment of the present invention, a method and computer readable storage medium that corresponds to the above system.